October 1st, 2010

Don’t you wish you knew somebody who had the best taste in music and could fill you in about all the latest, greatest bands? Well now you do with our latest discovery: museradio.fm. Set up a by two friends, Lilly Ladjevardi, who combines researching world music for the BBC with creating soundtracks for businesses, together with tech expert, Olivia Koerfer, museradio is an online music platform with specially created playlists that you can stream straight to your computer or download from i-tunes. There are sixteen playlists (with more added regularly) to suit every mood with music from Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Salif Keita to Laura Marling. It’s like discovering a set of brilliantly made mix tapes that you can pretend are all your very own.

December 11th, 2009

Olivia and I are in the process of creating our museradio.fm Christmas playlist! And just in case you were interested, we thought we’d write a bit about how that process works. First we need to get inspired. A few glasses of wine later… Just kidding.

First we come up with a rough concept. In this case, we imagined what we’d like to listen to in front of the fireplace around Christmas time. Warm, nostalgic tunes that go with the sense of carrying on tradition, but not necessarily the same versions of them that youve heard a million times before. Then we brainstorm and do a lot of listening, create a huge playlist with our favorites and start to pluck out the ones we arent in love with.

In this case, we’ve found some great gospel tracks, blues, gypsy jazz as well as tunes by classic Christmas balladeers such as Bing Crosby. This process is cyclical, as new tracks keep coming in and we get inspired and make associations. Then its about finding the right order. We love the Fats Waller version of Jingle Bells, which has become track number one. I think we’ve got a great list now. It will need some more fine tuning, as every playlists (or indeed every work) does.But it should be ready later next week, so stay tuned for some jolly Christmas fun!

November 11th, 2009

We are brainstorming ideas about how to make museradio.fm financially sustainable. As you can imagine, we don’t get much commission at all from reselling itunes tracks so we need to figure out a way to keep bringing you great music without going broke!

Some of the things we are thinking about:

Freemium: giving our users a great user experience for free but an even better one for a small fee. This would be either via micorpayments for streaming or some sort of subscription model.